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After playing a solid chunk of Bloober Team's upcoming survival horror, Cronos: The New Dawn, it's clear that there's plenty of potential due to the way enemies are prone to overwhelm you.

Nobody would blame developer Bloober Team for playing it safe with its first project following last year’s pretty great remake of Silent Hill 2. And yet, after having played an early preview build of Cronos: The New Dawn for roughly two hours, I sense a willingness here to push forward the genre envelope – ever so slightly. The Polish studio’s latest builds upon classic survival horror traditions such as inventory crafting and limited resources not just by relying on past tropes, but by creating a universe and ruleset all its own.

The upcoming game isn’t just another attempt to recapture the magic of Dead Space or Resident Evil 4; it’s Silent Hillmeets Twelve Monkeys. Which is to say an atmospheric time travel story neatly blended with a new style of enemy, made scarier due to how tough it can be to put down if left unchecked.

At the centre of it all is The Traveler, a mysterious, faceless figure clad in armour who makes a striking first impression. She emerges from her travel sphere with two simple goals: pick up the mission data left by the last fallen Traveler and find your target in need of teleportation, yes, back to the future. Your job is to dive back in specific moments of the past and save people who didn’t survive the end of the world the first time. I’m a sucker for a good time travel story as it is, but when you serve me up a premise as specific yet thought-provoking as this? It helps makes every action I take in the demo all the more weighty.

Taking place right at the start of the game, my demo set me on a path that required exploring a series of dilapidated, brutalist buildings that offer little respite from the stormy sky and wrecked landscapes that surround. Cronos: The New Dawn very much throws you into the deep end, as it were, instantly setting the stakes impossibly high with The Traveler equipped with little more than a simple pistol and a pretty beefy stomp – a la Isaac Clarke. Both manners of dispatch do well to help me get closer to my objective. Not helping, however, is the fact that – at least in this timeline – the world has been plagued by a series of mutated creatures disturbingly referred to in-universe as ‘Orphans’.

Bloober Team is keeping quiet as to the nature of how these gloopy, grotesque-looking Orphans came to be and in what ways they tie into the world-ending event at the heart of Cronos. But if EA’s addition to the survival horror oeuvre served as one simple instruction, ‘cut off their limbs’, Bloober Team’s original over-the-shoulder take asks something very different from you: ‘don’t let them merge’. It’s a piece of advice left behind for the Traveler to find fairly early on into this reality-tearing journey. But not only can it cause problems from a hypothetical standpoint. In practice, letting any Orphan merge with another can cause series problems when your back is against the wall.

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Putting an Orphan down and then moving on to your next target isn’t enough, you see. Instead, The Traveler comes equipped with a flame burst technique that means burning the bodies of her enemies so that larger, more terrifying variants of the foe just taken down don’t suddenly rise off the floor. The problem is, fuel tanks that power the flame burst aren’t always something to be relied upon, forcing you to try and lure any existing sludgy Orphans away from those lying on the floor – yet even then this might not be enough to stop them seeking any available former friends to consume.

There were various points in my demo where Cronos: The New Dawn locked me down into specific locations, unable to progress beyond a locked door until every enemy was dealt with. So far, so standard, as far as applying pressure in a game is concerned. However, here it’s easily to quickly find yourself overwhelmed and make the situation worse for yourself, should you not act swiftly or take the initiative to seek enemies out (rather than the other way around). The threat of enemies merging and becoming significantly tougher brings a great deal of strategy to the modern survival horror format. The kind of which I’ve not seen since Mr. X was introduced in theResident Evil 2 remake as Leon and Claire’s determined pursuer.

Outside of these high tension moments, Cronos admittedly elects to play it a bit safer. While exploring the abandoned wasteland of what used to be Krakow’s Nowa Huta steelworks, there’s the usual rigamarole of moving through areas while searching for resources, a light but of code-centric puzzle solving, and making the most of newly unlocked suit and weapon upgrades after reaching any one of the conveniently situated safe zones. All this is coated in a decent amount of lore-building texture, however, which for a short while ground you enough to temporarily forget where you might have seen such systems before. But then again, Bloober Team, did a good job with Silent Hill 2, so it’d be a shame to not lean into this knowledge somewhat.

By the time my preview demo ends I’ve survived several bouts of tense ‘me versus them’ where my ammo reserves have been depleted, fuel tanks are scarce, and the enemies merge far more often than I’d like. All this, plus a newly acquired function that lets my gun manipulate the environment between various states of degradation, leave me hopeful that Bloober Team is attempting to strike the right balance between survival horror nightmare with neat puzzles, and atmospheric time travel story where all is not as it seems.

Sadly, it’s when jumping into a portal to find my first target that the screen fades to black, and I’m left wondering whether the capturing sequences that follow will be just as intriguing. After all, this element of ‘rescuing’ people from the past won’t just be a one and done deal, according to Bloober Team, as The Traveler’s suit will increasingly become more haunted with their essence. None of this was available to experience in my short, hour-and-a-half demo, so I’m curious to see how it plays out.

For now, however, Cronos: The New Dawn is doing a pretty good job at taking familiar aspects from the modern survival horror genre and mixing in new elements of its own. It doesn’t make for a gameplay experience that’s entirely new per se, but one willing to take chances on features you think you know by twisting and tweaking the usual rules; particularly with regards to enemies. Rather appropriately for a game based around time travel, Cronos is remixing elements from the past to (hopefully) build an exciting future.